Iranian hacker admits stealing digital security certificates

An Iranian hacker has claimed that he acted alone in stealing digital security certificates used for online transactions by Google, Microsoft, Skype and Yahoo. The hacker claimed on Pastebin.com that he stole the certificates as a form of retribution for the joint authorship by the US and Israel of the Stuxnet worm.

Last week there was the suspicions that the hack was sponsored by the Iranian government and was an attempt to destabilise online transactions and erode trust in online security. The hacker posted detailed information, including names, accounts and passwords, about how he broke into the systems of InstantSSL.it, an Italian company that resold certificates supplied by a US-based company called Comodo.

He also insisted that he had no relation to Iranian Cyber Army, saying: "We just hack and own ... I'm a single hacker with the experience of 1,000 hackers."